Purpose This study develops and validates a tourist-centric model of AI-driven smart tourism villages (AI-DSTV), explaining how perceived digital infrastructure and smart governance relate to tourist acceptance and perceived regenerative tourism orientation (PRTO) through rural authenticity, value co-creation, AI trust, and perceived service value. Design/methodology/approach A cross-sectional survey involved 686 domestic tourists who had experienced an AI-supported tourism touchpoint in rural tourism settings in Indonesia. The sample was predominantly young and digitally engaged, with 75.1% aged 18–24 and 68.4% students. The model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) with 10,000 bootstrap resamples and importance-performance map analysis (IPMA). Findings All 12 hypothesized relationships were significant. Rural authenticity strongly enhanced perceived AI service value, while tourist value co-creation strengthened AI trust and ethical acceptance. Digital infrastructure and smart governance also showed significant downstream effects through authenticity–service-value and co-creation–trust pathways. The model explained 56.3% of PRTO variance. IPMA identified AI trust and ethical acceptance as the most important antecedent of PRTO and the lowest-performing construct, indicating a key managerial priority. Practical implications Rural destinations should prioritize transparent, culturally grounded, participatory and locally accountable AI systems. Strengthening ethical trust, co-creation, and culturally appropriate personalization may offer greater managerial leverage than technological sophistication alone. Originality/value The study extends technology-adoption research beyond behavioral acceptance by introducing PRTO as a tourist-level psychological outcome. It conceptualizes AI-DSTV as a socio-technical ecosystem linking destination readiness with authenticity, co-creation, trust and service evaluation while distinguishing regenerative orientation from verified destination regeneration.
Purpose This study formalizes the institutional necessity of startup accelerators within high-tech innovation ecosystems characterized by severe moral hazard. We evaluate how specialized secondary-market matchmaking and intensive milestone monitoring resolve capital allocation distortions when entrepreneurial behavior is unobservable. The study maps boundaries where traditional financing collapses due to moral hazard and technical asset specificity. It demonstrates how accelerators de-risk high-tech startups and expand downstream funding capacity for asset-constrained founders. Design/methodology/approach We develop a contracting model incorporating risk-neutral high-tech founders, outside investors, and an accelerator under limited liability and incentive compatibility constraints. The baseline interaction evaluates a specialized, indivisible frontier technology project of initial cost, analyzing how cash flow frictions restrict financing based on the founder's initial inside capital. We then extend this framework into a continuous variable-scale environment and a multi-period horizon featuring sequential milestone audits to track dynamic equity foreclosure architectures, runway scaling and accelerator intervention over time. Findings Without accelerators, high-tech founders face severe credit rationing because early-stage cash flows cannot simultaneously motivate founders and satisfy investors under limited liability. Information gaps and technical asset specificity cause severe open-market verification frictions, forcing outside capital providers to seize aggressive milestone equity stakes that create a value-destroying dynamic dilution trap. Accelerators break this cycle via a dual-transmission engine: micro-level cohort monitoring compresses private benefits, while macro-level secondary-market matching optimizes asset redeployability. Analytically, our framework demonstrates that resolving this deep-tech market failure requires targeted ecosystem policies, specifically funding regional cohort audits and corporate technology clearinghouses. Originality/value This study addresses a critical theoretical gap by modeling accelerators as post-investment contractual mechanisms rather than simple pre-investment information certifiers. While existing entrepreneurial finance literature focuses heavily on financial screening and adverse selection, our framework captures how accelerators mitigate hidden moral hazard and asset specificity frictions. Our framework uniquely treats the accelerator as a specialized institutional bridge. By building a formal mechanism design framework based on foundational contract theory, we provide a structural foundation demonstrating how dual-layered intermediary conduct directly lowers asset boundaries to compress dynamic dilution traps and preserve runway incentives, expanding downstream financing capacity for asset-light founders.
Purpose This study conceptualizes digital infrastructure (DI) as a socio-technical design space in which sustainability is governed by infrastructure rather than being assessed post hoc through environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting. In addition, sustainability is treated as a property of design-compliance that can be embedded, enforced and verified in DI. Design/methodology/approach A multi-stage systematic review and realist synthesis are conducted on peer-reviewed publications since 2016. Following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) technique, the survey focuses on the literatures with one sustainability mechanism and controllable and verifiable assurance artifacts in DI. Reflexive thematic analysis is combined with realist context–mechanism–outcome (CMO) analysis to integrate mechanism-by-design patterns in five non-overlapping layers of DI. Findings Mechanism-by-design configurations are classified into four layers, i.e. (1) observability and assurance as the verification layer, (2) carbon- and energy-based objectives embedded in site reliability engineering (SRE) at service layer, (3) energy-aware workload placement and autoscaling at the orchestration layer and (4) policy-as-code gates in CI/CD pipelines. Design-compliance is fully satisfied when comparators, assurance artifacts and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) co-locate at the same locus of DI. The effectiveness of DI depends on regulatory maturity, telemetry granularity, deployment topology and governance routines. Originality/value The study advances the study in digital transformation and sustainability in the sense that (1) the sustainability is conceptualized as a cybernetic control property in DI and (2) design-compliance outcomes are introduced as verifiable governance at the infrastructure level.
Purpose Coastal destinations increasingly implement green attributes, yet evidence remains limited on which attributes activate tourists' cognitive, emotional, and moral mechanisms that lead to eco-friendly participation, and whether any of these mechanisms are indispensable for high participation levels. This study tests a cognitive–affective–normative model linking green coastal destination attributes to tourists' participation in eco-friendly coastal activities. Design/methodology/approach Survey data were collected from 600 tourists visiting coastal destinations in Thailand's Eastern Economic Corridor. The proposed model was assessed using partial least squares structural equation modeling to test sufficiency-based relationships, complemented by necessary condition analysis to identify non-substitutable prerequisites for high levels of eco-friendly participation. Findings Green attributes showed heterogeneous effects. Awareness of consequences was mainly driven by energy-efficient facilities, eco-friendly accommodation, sustainable sourcing, and heritage preservation, while conservation efforts and green labeling had a limited impact. Environmental empathy was primarily influenced by eco-friendly accommodation, followed by conservation efforts, energy-efficient facilities, and green labeling, with other attributes showing no significant effects. Awareness of consequences strongly increased ascribed responsibility, which in turn was the key driver of personal norms; environmental empathy contributed only marginally. Personal norms were the strongest predictor of eco-friendly participation. Necessary condition analysis further revealed that ascribed responsibility and personal norms are indispensable for high participation, whereas green attributes and empathy are not. Originality/value This study extends coastal sustainability research by combining partial least squares structural equation modeling and a necessary condition analysis to distinguish between factors that enhance eco-friendly participation and those that are indispensable for achieving high participation levels.
